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Friday, 27 September 2013

High profile entrepreneur Luke Johnson prefers them hard, at the expense of the soft.

I criticised him for his view that research and education funding should be concentrated even more on science, technology, engineering and maths subjects in my post on the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference blog, which can be accessed here.

In my capacity as one of the organisers I also invited Luke to attend EPIC. I wanted him to hear at first hand why "in order to be an engineer it is not enough to be an engineer," from some representatives of the technology companies he lauds.

Luke declined the offer and I responded: The exchange can be found below.

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Nik

Thanks for the invitation.

I’m afraid I have too much to do to
attend your conference.

I understand why you hold the views
you do, but I stand by my opinion on the importance of STEM education if the UK
is to retain its relative economic strength in the 21st century.
Social scientists didn’t found Google, Intel, IBM, Facebook, Microsoft etc.

Best

Luke

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Thanks for your response Luke,

Sorry to hear you can’t make the conference. Two points I’d
like to make before signing off:

a) Microsoft et al.’s global dominance might be better (or
at least co-) explained by a domestic US culture of risk taking or the
availability of VC money for example

b) China and India churn out hundreds of thousands of
engineers, yet lag in terms of innovation related to most STEM fields (measured by e.g. patents)

c) A number of US tech company founders dropped out of
their STEM courses and are proud of it

2

As a senior person developing products at a well-known Internet
company confided in me recently “purely engineering-driven companies do not
succeed for long.” Most large players are investing heavily in understanding what people want so that
their original inspirational ideas live on in relevant ways, or so that they
can take bold new directions. In the UK, Amstrad might have been a different
proposition with social scientists or humanities trained researchers on board